Ward Pettibone is an author on six research publications, and each one lists multiple authors, a standard feature of sleep and memory research produced by laboratory teams.
At UCLA, Pettibone is a neuroscientist and PhD candidate. His sleep research publications come from team projects with several contributing researchers.
A multi-author byline credits each person who contributed part of the work. In much of biomedical science, author order follows field conventions about who led which stage.
Six publications grew out of laboratory teams
Before his graduate studies, Pettibone worked as an associate researcher at Mount Sinai. He studied motor gist learning, tau tangles and sleep in that role.
Earlier, he earned a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience at New York University. Episodic-like memory was the focus of his undergraduate research. In animal research, the term refers to remembering what happened, where it happened and when.
After sleep, his research has examined gist extraction and rule extrapolation. Gist extraction is the brain’s work of pulling general rules from specific experiences.
Laboratory teams of this kind produce collaborative sleep research publications, in which design, data collection, scoring and writing often fall to different people. Many journals now print a contribution statement that lists each author’s role.
His publications are indexed on Google Scholar, where he maintains a profile. His honors include the Frontiers in Neuroscience Editor’s Pick Collection (2021).
A current project shows the stages before a paper
Pettibone’s current UCLA project began with two linked questions. It asks whether local sleep affects the ability to learn, and whether learning changes the local sleep that follows.
Local sleep occurs when one brain region is in a different sleep state from another at the same moment. It has been seen in humans and rodents and is distinct from the unihemispheric sleep of birds and dolphins.
Another current project explores regional sleep after a hippocampal learning task. His current work also involves place recall and the flexible updating of place memories.
The purpose of local sleep is poorly understood. Sleep in general, though, is well documented as important for learning and memory, and the project tests whether local sleep itself is involved.
The tools came before the data
The project needed its own equipment, and building it came before any data could be gathered. Pettibone designed and built custom local field potential electrodes for the prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, hippocampus and striatum, capturing all four at once.
He also designed, built and programmed a fully automated apparatus for the Hidden Goal Task. In that task, a reward follows when a subject stays within an unmarked location.
The protocol spans seven days. Each day opens with a retest on the previous day’s location, and then the rewarded location shifts.
The recording schedule covers about 23 hours a day. Local sleep is not necessarily confined to the light or dark phase, so shorter sessions could miss it.
Every region’s signal gets its own score for each 10-second epoch. The four possible labels are wake, slow-wave sleep, transition-to-REM and REM.
Merging the four scored regions reveals local sleep, defined as any epoch in which at least one region differs. More than 10,000 hours of sleep recordings have come out of the project so far, and analysis is ongoing.
Conferences carry work to peers before print
Scientific conferences give researchers a place to present work before it reaches a journal. Poster sessions are one common format, with presenters standing beside a printed summary of their study. Visitors question presenters directly, one conversation at a time.
In 2024, Pettibone received the Poster Award at the UCLA BRI Future of Neuroscience conference. That year he also received the UCLA BRI/Semel Institute Graduate Student Travel Award.
In 2023, he received the UCLA BRI Flexible Travel Award. Travel awards cover costs of attending scientific meetings.
Journal submission follows the conference stage for many projects. Editors send manuscripts to outside reviewers, who can request new analyses or revisions before acceptance. In single-blind review, reviewers know the authors’ names, but authors do not learn the reviewers’ names.
Accepted papers then join the published literature, where other researchers can cite and build on them.
Recognition reached audiences outside the lab
Pettibone received the Science Communication Award, UCLA, in 2021. Public talks and science writing carry the findings of team-authored sleep research publications to readers outside the field.
The Museum of Science in Boston, MA, hosted his invited talk in 2020. The talk was titled Multiverse: Your Brain on Sleep, and the Science Communication Award followed one year later.
His earliest listed honors date to his undergraduate years. He held a Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund Grant from New York University in 2015-16.
The Sigma Xi Undergraduate Division Award (The Scientific Research Honor Society) came in 2016. With his later honors, the list runs from 2015 to 2024.
Six papers make up Pettibone’s sleep research publications to date. His current local sleep project at UCLA is a separate, ongoing study.
About Ward Pettibone
Based in Los Angeles, California, Ward Pettibone is a neuroscientist and PhD candidate at UCLA whose research centers on sleep, learning, and memory. His doctoral project explores how local sleep and spatial learning relate, using electrophysiology, behavioral assays and machine learning. His publications are listed on Pettibone’s personal website.
